A group of 7 developers worked on the app over a few days and as well as meeting each other and learning from each other they also managed to work on various improvements which I have summarised below.

2 factor authentication (nearly)

Work has been done towards allowing 2fa logins to the app.

Lots of the login & authentication code has been refactored and the app now uses the clientlogin API module provided by Mediawiki instead of the older login module.

When building to debug the 2fa input box will appear if you have 2fa login enabled, however the current production build will not show this box and simply display a message saying that 2fa is not currently supported. This is due to a small amount of session handling work that the app still needs.

Better menu & Logout

As development on the app was fairly non existent between mid 2013 and 2016 the UI generally fell behind. This is visible in forms, buttons as well as app layout.

One significant push was made to drop the old style ‘burger’ menu from the top right of the app and replace it with a new slide out menu draw including a feature image and icons for menu items.

Uploaded images display limit

Some users have run into issues with the number of upload contributions that the app loads by default in the contributions activity. The default has always been 500 and this can cause memory exhaustion / OOM and a crash on some memory limited phones.

In an attempt to fix and generally speed up the app a recent upload limit has been added to the settings which will limit the number images and image details that are displayed, however the app will still fetch and store more than this on the device.

Nearby places enhancements

The nearby places enhancements probably account for the largest portion of development time at the pre hackathon. The app has always had a list of nearby places that don’t have images on commons but now the app also has a map!

The map is powered by the mapbox SDK and the current beta uses the mapbox tiles however part of the plan for the Vienna hackathon is to switch this to using the wikimedia hosted map tiles at https://maps.wikimedia.org.

The map also contains clickable pins that provide a small pop up pulling information from Wikidata including the label and description of the item as well as providing two buttons to get directions to the place or read the Wikipedia article.

Image info coordinates & image date

Extra information has also been added to the image details view and the image date and coordinates of the image can now be seen in the app.

Summary of hackathon activity

The contributions and authors that worked on the app during the pre hackathon can be found on Github at the following link.

Roughly 66 commits were made between the 11th and 19th of May 2017 by 9 contributors.

The RevisionSlider is an extension for MediaWiki that has just been deployed on all Wikipedias and other Wikimedia websites as a beta feature. The extension was developed by Wikimedia Germany as part of their focus on technical wishes of the German speaking Wikimedia community. This post will look at the RevisionSliders design, development and use so far.

Since some time in January of this year I have been on a mission to un-delete all Wikidata items that were merged into other items before the redirect functionality of Wikidata existed. Finally I am done (well nearly). This is the short story…

Reasoning

Earlier this year I pointed out the importance of redirects on Wikidata in a blog post. At the time I was amazed at how the community nearly said that they were not going to create redirects for merged items…. but thank the higher powers that the discussion just swung in favour of redirects.

Redirects are needed to maintain the persistent identifiers that Wikidata has. When two items relate to the same concept, they are merged and one of the identifiers must then be left pointing to the identifier now holding the data of the concept.

Listing approach

Since Wikidata began there have been around 1,000,000 log entries deleting pages, which equates to roughly the same number of items deleted, although some deleted items may also have been restored. This was a great starting point. The basic query to get this result was can be found below.

At this stage I could have probably tried and remove more items depending on if they currently exist, but there was very little point. In fact it turned out that there was very little point in the above query as prior to my run very few items were un-deleted in order to create redirects.

The next step was to determine which of the logged deletions were actually due to the item being merged into another item. This is fairly easy as most cases of merges used the merge gadget on Wikidata.org. So if the summary matched the following regular expression! I would therefore assume it was deleted due to being merged / a duplicate of another item.

1

/(same as|duplicate|merge)/i

And of course in order to create a redirect I would have to be able to identify a target, so, match Q id links.

1

/\[\[(Q\d+)\]\]/i

I then had a fairly nice list, although it was still large, but it was time to actually start trying to create these redirects!

Editing approach

So firstly I should point out that such a task is only possible while using an Admin account, as you need to be able to see deleted revisions / un-delete items. Secondly it is not possible to create a redirect over a deleted item and also not possible to restore an item when that would create a conflict on the site, for example due to duplicate site links on items or duplicate joined labels and descriptions.

I split the list up into 104 different sections, each containing exactly 10,000 item IDs. I could then fire up multiple processes to try and create these redirects to make the task go as quickly as possible.

The process of touching a single ID was:

Make sure that the target of the merge exists. If it does not then log to a file, if it does, continue.

Try to un-delete the item. If the deletion fails log to a file, if it is successful continue.

Try to clear the item (as you can only create redirects over empty items). This either results in an edit or no edit, it doesn’t really matter.

Try to create the redirect, this should never fail! If it does log to a fail file that I can clean up after.

The approach on the whole worked very well. As far as I know there were no incorrect un-deletions and nothing failing in the middle.

The first of 2 snags that I hit was the rate at which I was trying to edit was causing the dispatch lag on wikidata to increase. There was no real solution to this other than to keep an eye on the lag and if it ever increased above a certain level to stop editing.

Wikidata was launched on 30 October 2012 and was the first new project of the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006. The first phase enabled items to be created and filled with basic information: a label – a name or title, aliases – alternative terms for the label, a description, and links to articles about the topic in all the various language editions of Wikipedia.

On 14 January 2013, the Hungarian Wikipedia became the first to enable the provision of interlanguage links via Wikidata. This functionality was slowly enabled on more sites until it was enabled on all Wikipedias on the 6th March.

The side bar that these interlanguage links are used to generate can be seen to the right. Continue reading

The hotel (Valpre-Lyon) was absolutely beautiful with large grass areas, great architecture and a place for you weather you wanted to have a large or small discussion, sit quietly or sit outside. As well as Pétanque, table tennis was also available as well as plenty of people to meet!

I planned on primarily hacking on my MassAction extension along with one of two others but as at any hackathon I got massively distracted talking to people and working on other projects. Continue reading

MassAction is a Mediawiki extension allowing users to perform mass actions on targets on a Mediawiki site through a static page using Mediawikis inbuilt job queue that I have been working on for the past half a year or so. I look forward to releasing it to the open source world soon!

addwiki is a collection of Mediawiki related PHP libraries (including one for wikibase). Previous to this I developed various PHP scripts and bots for Wikipedia using other libraries and always found that they were quite badly coded and prone to doing unexpected things. Addwiki is the start of my attempt to fix that for PHP.

Orain (github) is a community-driven, not-for-profitwiki network that I help to keep running.

Wikimania 2014 was a 2000+ person conference, festival, meetup, workshop, hackathon, and celebration, spread over five days in August 2014, preceded and followed by fringe events. Wikimania is the official annual event of the Wikimedia movement, where one can discover all kinds of projects that people are making with wikis and open content, as well as meet the community that produced the most famous wiki of all, Wikipedia!

The core event was held in and around The Barbican Centre in London, UK.

This year the Wikimedia Hackathon was held in Zürich, Switzerland from the 9th to 11th May 2014. The organization of the event was great, from lanyards and badges that included a USB memory stick to a city map and a ticket for public transport, Wikimedia Switzerland had prepared fantastic hackathon.

More than 150 developers, engineers, sysadmins, and technology enthusiasts gathered coming from more than 30 countries aiming to share knowledge about new and existing technologies, fix bugs, come up with new ideas and work together on tools and systems relating to the Wikimedia movement.

As the name suggests a lot of time at a hackathon is spent ‘hacking’ (coding and such) there are also workshops available on all days. This year these workshops and talks included multiple sessions on ‘Vagrant’ working toward a production like development system, ‘Open data’ looking at Wikidata and government open data as well as sessions of ‘Phabricator’ and ‘Jenkins’.

Hackathons are not just a place to hack, but they provide people with a crucial time to allow people with different specialisms and interests to meet each other in person, put faces to names and names to pseudonyms, to build relationships and in turn build the movement.